During brand discovery, the client answers a series of questions about their mission and company values which the designer uses to produce myriad design directions. A visual identity (or brand) will take shape and eventually form somewhere between the client’s personal investment and the designer’s professional objectivity. When designers are tasked with creating their own brand, a challenge arises: how can one remain objective when the designer and client are one and the same?
I certainly was not immune to the situation, it was only yesterday that I created my visual identity after working as a designer for 12 years.
Laying around in various sketchbooks and old Zip disks, I’ve accumulated dozens of brand designs that I kept for maybe a day or month at most. I used circles, squares, and polygons with my name or just an initial. I played with Sanskrit, Arabic, even Cyrillic characters to visually illustrate my name. I would take up a visual identity with aplomb, then return a month later to throw it away and start over.
In the midst of a site redesign – let’s not even go there as to how many iterations this site has seen – I had a moment of clarity and saw my brand as clear as the monitor in front of me as I type this. I opened Illustrator and quickly went to work. This is what I created:
The design spoke to me, I knew that I had just found myself.
I broke out my PANTONE books and looked at various color swatches. I was careful not to select colors that my clients use—a bit of a bummer for me since I’m partial to gunmetal which I already used for Grahall’s visual identity. Then I saw a series of blues that I could not pass up.
Cue Handel’s Messiah.
I still have to produce a flat brand for print, as well as a brand style guide, for my new identity, but I could not be any happier. I can finally print business cards for myself without second thoughts! I can make and sell merchandise! My friends will have the most awesome coffee mugs ever.
A friend and fellow designer said to me the other day via e-mail:
We don’t see ourselves clearly enough to do our own branding a lot of the time. We get too stuck in our perception of who the hell we are.
True, a challenging task for most designers is creating their own visual identity, but this is nothing to be ashamed of. Hell, if anything, it provides work for other designers (like myself). And – and! – just think of all the awesome merchandise you can make for friends and clients.